It’s a scary place, the brain of Ben.

It consists mainly of Alan Partridge and Father Ted episodes, cocktail recipes, and rain-man-esque recall of horsepower and torque figures for most production cars. There’s also usually something in there about whisky.

What I can tell you about the brain of Ben though, is that these Boutique-y whiskies have recently been upgraded from ‘a bit of fun’, to ‘something with a lot of potential’.

Because of this, you’re going to see a pretty decent number of new releases from brand spanking new distilleries over the next few weeks / months, and if the results of some of the recent whisky auctions are anything to go by, I think we’ll see them selling out in pretty short order.

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You remember our friends from Caskstrength.net? Bespectacled, dapper sort of chaps? They’re into whisky and Alan Partridge, do some events…?

Anyway, they’ve gone and teamed up with BenRiach to put together one of them there special bottlings, they have. And between you and me, it is a delight. Not just because it comes with a rockin’ cotton tote bag (well, only the first 50 bottles, mind you), not just because it has a pink label (I am a sucker for pink) [ed: don't you mean red?], and not just because it spent four years in a PX cask (I am a major sucker for PX). It is delightful because it was hand-selected by Joel and Neil themselves, only 296 bottles are to be released, and you can only buy it from us. What an expression of a beautiful friendship…or, marriage? More...

Gareth: We clung on, fingertips buried in the soft mulch of the steep hillside as the Spey roared dark and terrible in the late afternoon light, 60 feet below.

How had it come to this? Half an hour ago we'd been enjoying the rich, dark fruit notes of a Macallan 25yo. Now we faced the very real danger of plunging to our deaths in a raging torrent. Something had gone wrong somewhere, and it was only my third day on the job. More...

The two most popular choices for whisky ageing - sherry casks and bourbon barrels - offer a totally different style of single malt and here at Master of Malt, we love both in equal measure. Just like with children, it’s wrong to have a favourite (unless one child is a maths-whiz-head-boy-sports-star-type, and the other is one of those miserable kids that dyes his hair black and combs it over his face, whilst complaining constantly about how “unfair it all is”). More...

A couple of weeks back, a contingent of Chaps from Master of Malt attended the brand new Boisdale over at Canary Wharf, for an extra special Old Pulteney tasting.

The tasting was led by Lucas of Edinburgh Whisky Blog fame and now brand ambassador for Inver House.

First off, the venue was fantastic. The Boisdale over at Victoria is superb, but the new one, right in the heart of Canary Wharf, is astonishing. On the 2nd floor (the whisky bar/jazz club) is an enormous window that spans one side of the room entirely, and it overlooks the Credit Suisse building, and beyond that, the Thames. It was an idyllic setting as we sat at the bar enjoying a couple of G&Ts prior to the tasting. More...

Last year there was an astonishing discovery in Antarctica, just outside of what was once Ernest Shackleton’s hut. The discovery was several cases of Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt whisky, which had been left behind after a failed attempt to reach the South Pole between 1907 and 1909.

Whyte and Mackay, who own the Mackinlay’s brand, leapt at the incredible opportunity to try and recreate a whisky from a bygone era, under the lead of their inimitable Master Blender, Richard Paterson.

"It's a beautiful colour. It's that lovely rich golden colour and what's more important at this early stage, it's beautifully clear.” Richard describes the whisky, adding: "It's telling you that it's not contaminated -- that's very important." More...

The most recent addition to our single cask selection is a 30 Year Old Caol Ila, distilled in 1980.

It was aged in a refill hogshead, and is of a release including just 154 bottles, all of which are non chill-filtered and bottled at natural cask strength (which was 57.4%).

Having never tried a Caol Ila of this age that wasn’t delicious, we’re looking forward to getting our lips around this one… More...

We asked a few well-known spirits/drinks writers to come up with delicious wintry cocktails using our 8 year old blended whisky, and our new cask-aged whisky bitters.

This week we’ve teamed up with Joshua Hatton to bring you the next thrilling instalment in our guest cocktail blog series. Joshua not only writes a superb blog, he is also President and Founder of the Jewish Single Malt Whisky Society based over in the good ol’ US of A. We posted Joshua a bottle of our very own 8 year old blended whisky and a bottle of our brand new and very fine cask-aged whisky bitters. More...

Earlier this year we flew up to Glengoyne to help select a very special cask for bottling. The cask would be chosen by the great and the good from England’s whisky retailers, and we’ve been very excited to announce it is now in stock!

Sample after sample were tried until the very best cask was found - it’s a hard life, that of the whisky merchant ;-). Pleasingly, it’s a very, very dark little whisky, thanks mainly to the sherry hoggie it was matured in. The beautiful bottles arrived yesterday, and the packaging is rather handsome – wooden and very smart.

The whisky was distilled on the 17th June 1997, and, of course, it’s bottled at cask strength (bottled on the 20th May 2010 at 13 years of age). We uncorked a bottle to recount just how wonderful it is… More...

Okay, so once in a while at MoM towers, we like to make a brief foray into the wonderful (if dangerous) world of Mixology.

Over the next few months we’ll be publishing some reasonably detailed recipes of our favourite whisky cocktails for you to make at home – and this week’s instalment is the famous Blood and Sand.

This absolute belter of a cocktail is best made with fresh orange juice, but (and this is really important) you’ll need to find More...